It’s Faster If I Do It Myself

In the transition to a management and leadership role, one of the greatest challenges new leaders face isassuming that you can do it better or faster (or both) than the people working for you.

If I could just do this myself, it’ll be faster. I’ll only need a weekend and some focus hours to solve this problem, and the solution will be neater, faster, and up to my standards. Clearly the team can’t be trusted with the work, it’s taking too long. The folks I’ve hired just aren’t working to the same standards as I am. Rather than taking the time (or multiple times) explaining this, I can just do it myself.

We’ve heard all of these statements in our coaching practices. We’ve been there ourselves. The step from doing the work yourself to hiring other people to do it is enormous. You were hired because you had some intricate knowledge about a domain or technology. You started a company for the love of building something.

Underneath this longing lie several issues. One is the simple joy and satisfaction of building something. When it goes live, customers use it, and feedback comes in. That cycle is addictive. For a tinkerer like myself, trying to figure things out until they’re working, that’s where the energy comes from to keep going. Or at least it used to. Until I hired people.

You hire people because you want to do more and need more hands. A growing business doesn’t give you enough time to be involved everywhere. In this transition, as the company grows around you, you need to spend a lot of time explaining things, documenting things, managing people, setting expectations on standards and outcomes. All of that takes time, which you usually don’t have enough of as the business keeps on growing and your plate is already overflowing. So you hire folks, let them have a crack at it, and then frustration sets in. They’re not getting it. They’re not committed. They’re not performing. Again, these are statements we’ve heard from our clients and that we’ve muttered ourselves.

That there isn’t enough time is the default excuse. Underneath it all is fear: Fear of micromanaging people, of them not doing the work the way you would, or of them taking too long. And the fear of giving them the wrong information, of spelling out expectations wrong or incomplete, and of having to enter unknown territory.

This part of management is frustrating. Delegating successfully means that you have to let go of your own notions of what exactly the work should be. You still get to set the standards, agree on outcomes, provide feedback, and coach people to do their best work. You create cycles of accountability.

This shift is challenging. It took me a long time to understand and appreciate the joy and satisfaction you get, as a manager, when your team is getting better and better in their work instead of doing the work yourself.

Recent hype words like “founder mode” create the illusion that it doesn’t have to be this way. Founders can stay the same, they can and should be involved in everything and anything. There’s comfort in the idea that you don’t need to change, but that ignores the fact that your business does as it’s growing. When you focus more on one thing, there will be plenty of other stuff you leave by the wayside. Letting go is a matter of scale. You hired all these people, now make sure they can do their best work.

AI is another comforting tool that creates the illusion of personal speed and productivity. The CTO finally gets to be technical again. So does the CEO, or everyone really. Instead of talking to people, they can talk to agents, who will do as told and don’t push back unless explicitly prompted. It’s comforting. It’s the kind of tinkering that got you into technical work in the first place. Now you can convince yourself that you need fewer people to do the same work. Or you’d even be faster with a smaller team. The CEO psychosis that AI can solve any problem faster, better, and cheaper, is indeed very real.

The stories we tell ourselves about everyone else, their motives, and their character are truly what’s holding us back when we need to grow into leaders. While AI might make it easier for you to get back into creating something, you still have people working for you. They still need the same support, direction, and opportunities to learn and stretch themselves as before. You still need to do the work of management and create an environment where they can rely on access to all of them. Letting go is the hardest part of this process, but it is so worth it, both for your own growth and that of your team.

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